shackles

[lorraine1]

bought new shackles to put on but noticed the frame is so bad it cant be done unless u find about 2 feet of frame yo weld on,any other ideas?its a 5.0 and in 5 years only replaced brakes,battery,water pump ,battery it has been a great vehicle,too bad ford ruined the new ones by changing everything,the 98 5.0 was as good as it gets with the cast iron heads instead of that aluminum crap.

 

[traveler]

How is the frame so bad? Corrosion? bent? something else? I don't doubt you when you say it is bad, just trying to get a better picture of what you are speaking of.

 

[Mbrooks420]

There’s nothing wrong with aluminum heads. If the 98 5.0 was as good as motors ever got, that’d be a sore disappointment.

If you can weld you can fix your current frame. I wouldn’t bother with donor rails, unless near free, and would just plate what you have.

 

[lorraine1]

i grew up when everything was cast iron,i dont know how old you are ,but, with the cast iron heads i just let them cool down a little ,put more water in it and drive anywhere,try that with aluminum,and yes cast iron heads will warp also,but this was back in the day as they say,new cars are plastic mobiles .they are mostly plastic,the glass,the metal and everything else is thinner to make more money from it.back in the day you rarely had a problem with the cast heads,now with the new ones its usually a head warping or a fuel pump bad,no wonder the auto industry is getting so rich,

 

[Mbrooks420]

If I had my choice I’d have aluminum heads on all my motors. Aluminum heads aren’t about saving money. Virtually every high performance motor has as many bolt on aluminum parts as possible. I don’t worry about warping heads since I don’t drive with anything that is overheating.

 

[RandomNerd2000]

I've had both, I'm indifferent to cast or aluminum heads, each have their perks.

Anyhow for your issue, what you mean by bad? Corrosion? Holes? Paper thin? If it's that you can either plate it with weld in repair steel, or replace the frame which is a BIG undertaking.

 

[German Engineer]

i grew up when everything was cast iron,i dont know how old you are ,but, with the cast iron heads i just let them cool down a little ,put more water in it and drive anywhere,try that with aluminum,and yes cast iron heads will warp also,but this was back in the day as they say,new cars are plastic mobiles .they are mostly plastic,the glass,the metal and everything else is thinner to make more money from it.back in the day you rarely had a problem with the cast heads,now with the new ones its usually a head warping or a fuel pump bad,no wonder the auto industry is getting so rich,

Back in those days engines and heads were designed and manufactured very differently from today.
A new cast iron head will really not be all that comparable to an old one like you're used to thinking of from growing up.

In the end it basically all only comes down to the design and manufacturing quality. You can have a bad cast iron head and a great aluminum head just like you can have it the exact other way around.
Aluminum is more common in modern engines and can easier be manufactured to better specs and quality than a cast head, but that of course again doesn't mean a specific head from a specific manufacturer really is.

One reason why on old engines you could just let it cool down and add a little water, was because these old heads were much more solid and had much thicker walls.
Modern heads tend to have much thinner walls, they have twice as many valves in them and a bunch of hollow spaces to reduce material and weight old heads don't have. And that is the actual reason why old heads were so much more forgiving to overheating than modern ones. It took more to get them to crack than it does on modern heads.
Also very imprtant is the fact that engines back then didn't nearly produce as much power and with that also much less HEAT as modern engines do. (Half the power means half the heat to dissipate from the cylinders in the engine. It pretty much really is that simple because of the physics of the Carnot process.)
Also back then even water cooled engines used to dissipate as much as 70% of the heat directly to the air around them and only 30% via the coolant or water and the radiator.

But all this has changed quite dramatically with increased fuel efficiency, more power and higher RPMs. That's why cylinder heads tend to crack easier when a modern engine overheats than they used to do on old engines.